Spee

[William Hubbs]

Hi all,

I want to reply to the comments about viavoice.

On Fri, Jan 08, 2010 at 06:41:01AM -0500, Bill Cox wrote:
> I wanted to reply to Tim's specific speech-dispatcher related point:
> 
> On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 6:16 PM, Tim Cross <tcross at rapttech.com.au> wrote:
> ...
> > For the Linux environment, projects such as speech-dispatcher are of 
> > critical
> > importance. Good quality, stable text-to-speech is critical to all of the
> > approaches. It is a fundamental requirement. One thing I do wish would 
> > happen
> > is an update of the IBM ViaVoice Outloud libraries for Linux. this is my
> > preferred TTS engine. I wish it was updated so that it no longer required 
> > the
> > old stdc++ libraries and was available in 64 bit versions. I've tried most 
> > of
> > the other TTS solutions available for Linux, but none of them have the 
> > clarity
> > (especially at high speech rates), responsiveness and features of Viavoice.
 
 If someone has heard differently, please correct me; I am definitely
 open to being corrected here.

 I use eloquence (which is the same product as I understand it) on
 windows, and I also consider it to be one of the most responsive
 software speech synthesizers I have worked with.

My understanding, however, is that the manufacturer has no intention of
updating or supporting it any longer on linux.  I can't comment about
windows, but I understand that support and updates, at least on linux,
will not happen.

> The Outloud voice is still around, and available from oralux.org at
> their cost.  I'm using it now, on Ubuntu Karmic x64.  This is a great
> example of why speech-dispatcher is important.  I want to write an
> emacspeak driver for SD, if I can ever find the time, because the
> outloud driver is crazy-hard to get working in 64-bit land.

I'm afraid that eventually it will not work at all and there will be no
option but to get away from it.

William

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